Editing the Quay CRD in order to set HPA as unmanaged and then increase the number of minReplicas in the HPA resources causes a conflict between Operator and HPA in the management of replicas.

As a consequence, new pods are created by the HPA but removed by the Operator continuously, so the HPA stops working.

This behaviour can be observed in the following scenarios:

• HPA set as unmanaged in Quay CRD, keeping the deployment as managed, and minReplicas of HPA increased
• HPA set as unmanaged in Quay CRD, keeping the deployment as managed with an override to increase the number of replicas, and minReplicas of HPA increased to the same value
  • In this case, continuous pods creation and deletion start when HPA tries to scale them

It seems there is not a way to increase pod replicas while keeping the HPA properly scaling them.